


There Will Come Soft Rains

by orphan_account



Series: Fullmetal Fortnight 2014 [9]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Gen, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-13
Updated: 2014-03-13
Packaged: 2018-01-15 13:38:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1306807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mei and Scar bear the weight of a people upon their burdened shoulders; to wash away the ashes of ruin, they must learn to play the rain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There Will Come Soft Rains

**Author's Note:**

> Written for FMA Week 2014. Prompt 5-A: "Past/Future". Also written for the prompt: "scar & mei + one of your favourite poems". The poem in question is "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Sara Teasdale.
> 
> As I've said before, this friendship is really important to me and props to firus_rising for the excellent prompt.
> 
> Unedited/unbeta'd/etc.

_i. a people without their king_

Ten years. Ten years of wandering, alone, with an arm of destruction hanging loosely at his side, an arm of salvation at the same, like some mischievous djinn had snipped the strings of fate. Rewound them in scarlet threads. Scarlet: blood, sacrifice, Ishvala.

The fabric soft in his palms, he slowly unravelled the sash stitched with his family crest, meticulous bands of orange and yellow and red—the colours of Ishvala, the patterns of Ishvala, manifested in the form of each lineage unique and diverse, and unified and together, in the same ageless carving of time like a sculpture sanded in chalk relief—and folded it over his wrist until the length of the sash ended, abrupt as death.

Kneeling beside the unmarked groove nestled between boulders cracked and ledges uplifted, he pressed his right palm to the blackened ground. Somewhere below the destruction lay his brother’s ashes. Cremated, in a manner that released the aching soul in his brother’s chest that sank into the soil of eternity and flitted on the winds of freedom, until his brother found the road home. Found the road to Ishvala’s bosom once more.

The city smouldered on the horizon. Orange and yellow. Glowing, dimmer than the stars overhead, in the same promised light of Ishvala, twisted and distorted by the men of fire and death.

In the ensuing chaos, he hadn’t been able to procure the necessary herbs, the incenses, the divine sacraments to fulfill, but he prayed, silent, by the graveside, that his words would carry his brother’s soul to its paradise. He knew: In Her heart, Ishvala would hear his faith.

He spent two weeks beside bonfires. Praying over each until his throat grew hoarse and his mouth grew arid, until his lips cracked and his fingertips bled. At length he felt himself unable to rise one morning; at length it dawned that his strength had failed him, and he alone could not pray to Ishvala the souls of the deceased. So numerous, so innocent, so silent.

To count them was to count the stars.

Discarded his family, discarded his legacy, discarded his name, so as not to tarnish the people of peace he had left behind in favour of that which he _could_ accomplish, weak and pathetic and mortal as he may have been.

He had his brother’s arm; with that he would cleave the world in halves for what it had gone. Then there would come soft rains, to quiet the flames the murderers had lit and he would feed until the ashes washed away.

 

_ii. a king without his people_

Ten years. Ten years since she heard her title for the first time: _Princess Chang_. No longer Mei, the wide-eyed girl who wrestled out of her mother’s grip, who ran screaming with joy through the fields of grass and weeds that surrounded her home, who scaled treetrunks to chatter with birds in the branches and wove flower crowns to twirl around her wrists. One morning she looped one around her head just as dusk ebbed sunlight from the skies.

When she stumbled into the house, grinning with all of her innocence of her three years, her mother snatched the crown from her head. The flowers curled to black in the flames that reflected amber in her mother’s eyes.

Mei pouted, crossed her arms, stomped her tiny feet. Her mother stared at her, a frown forming on her mouth. Her mother’s gaze lifted from the floor, for once. To sweep over Mei’s small frame, from the unruly shock of hair past her ears to the flat formidability of her unbound feet. “But I wanna be a princess!”

After a moment of quiet her mother nodded. “Mei, you _are_ a princess,” her mother said, her voice entirely level as though she were trying to hold back some measure of grief, as one holds back the sea with a dam a metre high, “but not yet. The world will hate you, and the world will laugh at you and call you names, but you _will_ serve the Chang.” Her mother exhaled and Mei shivered from the weight of the world escaping with that sigh. “You will grow up before your time.”

Her mother left for the capital, a far-off fantasyland called Xijing, and never came back.

In the meantime the fantasy of her childhood melted into a reality that a four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten year old girl could not face alone: the illness and famine that wreaked their havoc across her people, the coffers cobwebbed in their emptiness and the ancient wonders desiccated and desolated in their neglect, the nursery rhymes that taught the Fifty Clans and named the Chang the pigs, the mud, the lower than low if not the longest of them all.

She bowed before the patriarchs of forty-nine Clans. Pleaded on behalf of her people. Listened to their laughter. “ _You_ , marry _our_ sons?” they snapped, for unless she married, she would wield an utter nothingness of power with which to aid her Clan. “Still your tongue and learn to keep your eyes to the floor. Imagine, that a woman would speak like she had the right.”

She counted her exploits by the length of her hair and the count of her braids: They marked her mastery of alkahestry, which she could practise in the quiet of her inner solitude far from prying eyes and gaping mouths.

When her braids touched the floor and she bowed before the Emperor, blessed be His name, He brooded over her presence. “Ah, yes, your mother.” He stroked His beard. “The Amaranth Blossom, no?”

Mei bit her tongue to silence the question hot and silver-bitter on her tongue: _How dare He know her mother’s title but not her mother’s name?_ “Yes, Your Imperial Majesty.”

“Bring us the secret the immortality,” said He, and dismissed her in the same breath.

Though He scarcely knew the trajectory of his words, the civil war for the throne had begun, surreptitious and silent as a winding viper set to sink its fangs into Xing’s flank at the first instant of opportunity.

She stood outside the imperial palace under the heavens newly broken open; the scent of rain calmed her, the coolness of droplets on her cheeks rippled her _chi_ into stillness and serenity. Into peace. The freshness reminded her of the mystical forests that had raised her as a child, forests that had burned to the stumps and smouldered still like faintly glowing coals.

There would come soft rains and the smell of the ground, bursting free with millet and sorghum, baskets piled high with soybeans and peaches and lemons and beancurd and anise.

 

_iii. are lost, are lost as well_

He stirred the pot of boiling water carefully while Mei crouched at his side. Her benefactor, Tim Marcoh, huddled in the hooded jacket with his back against the alleyway wall. The chill dampened their limbs as the scarred man rekindled the flame. Ripping open the packet of rice, Mei shook the curled greyish white pearls into the water. Added ginger, just a hair. Rice soup would suffice for the day.

“Mr Scar?” She pocketed her hand to pet Xiao Mei, who propped her ears and muzzle from the inner folds of Mei’s robe. “I’m sorry if I’m asking something I shouldn’t be, but, um, Mr Scar, you were humming a song. In your sleep last night.” She laughed quietly to herself, in that almost peculiarly optimistically manner of a girl so entirely enthralled by the world around her that she couldn’t help but giggle at the beauty of it all, like the beauty of her universe threatened to split her and she had to release the joy somehow. “It sounded . . . wistful.” Mei hummed, a bar or two of the melody, and the scarred man slowed his actions. “I wanted to know, if you wouldn’t mind telling me. What was that?”

The melody.

The scarred man lowered his eyelids. Hummed the next several measures, parsimonious and languid and serene in its melancholy.

Slowly he lifted his head, a behemoth of stone shifting from its mountainous bed at last. “My—my _people_ had a song. A story. Of the twilight age.” She crossed her legs and cradled her chin in her palms. Marcoh scooted slightly closer to the fire, but even so he kept his distance; somehow, in the silence, he had understood the unfathomable connection. “My people believed that there would come an age of darkness during which the sinful would—” He exhaled. “—bring ruins to themselves and to each other. Only after that, Her people would see paradise come. For then Ishvala would bring paradise to the earth. The old will be made young, the maimed whole, the ill healthy, and mankind will live at peace, for once.”

Mei dipped her head. “In Xing, at least in the north, there’s a story about how, when the world ends, the gods who laid themselves down to become the earth—the god who became the mountains, or the god who cried himself dry so that the tears could become the seas—will rise again. They’ll recreate the world anew. Like the feng!” She rubbed the back of her neck with her palm. “Um. Uh. I think the Amestrisian word is the phoenix.”

The scarred man touched the ladle to the corner of the pot, leaned back in his kneeling position to set his weight on the backs of his lower legs.

Xiao Mei chittered; Mei stroked her head. “Could . . . could I hear the song?”

He studied her for a moment, studied her eagerness and her smile and the genuine hunger in her eyes, not to wrench his old culture between the heel of a firm black boot but to cup it in her palm and perhaps find a space within her heart to carry on a legacy.

He knew her type. Like his brother, who had borne the legacies of alkahestry and alchemy—Amestris, _and_ Xing, _and_ Xerxes—and had thrown himself to the wolves. And now his brother, if in some small way, had returned in the form of a thirteen-year-old girl so small for her age that he’d thought her nine or ten. But in that instant she seemed large enough to encompass the universe, and beyond.

The scarred man’s voice ground out low and rasped, but he sang anyway, soft as water and quiet as a summer night. First in Ishvalan, in a language she could not understand, and then in emotion, in a language she knew as well as her native Xingese tongue. “ _There would come soft rains and the smell of the ground, and swallows circling with their shimmering sound . . .”_

 

_iv. are found, are found as well_

After the Promised Day had come and gone—after he lost his name and found a road to hope, after she lost her throne and found a road to hope, after each lost their people and found them over again in the promise to promise of salvation and rebuilding their worlds—the pair waited patiently for the Emperor and the Führer to install the train tracks across the desert. Not even a week later two letters had passed between Ishval and Xing.

Of reconstruction. Of lost treasures. Of rekindling the flames of camaraderie and brotherhood in people lost to the barren wasteland.

Of songs, rediscovered. When he hummed the tune and suddenly the entirety of the enclave burst into the ancient song. When she strummed the strings of an erhu in tuning, her fingers not yet touching the bow, and already the people around her had turned to sing in time, ten or twenty folksongs starting up at once like a bazaar of brilliance.

Ishvalans, united. The Chang, united. Still shaky, and still broken, and both unfortunately aided by imbalanced powers—in Ishval, by the Amestrisian government, by the very murderers who had committed atrocities against the People of Ishvala; in the Chang land grant, by the Yao and other wealthier Clans, by the very exploiters who had left the Chang in shambles of poverty and starvation those generations ago—but they were gaining strength with every breath of every one of their people who lived and work and carved their legacy upon the ground.

And over the years the grounds shifted. The desert crept back to reveal buildings of white and weavings of sashes in every shade of yellow and orange and red in the glorious flames of Ishvala’s sun, while the Amestrisians retreated with treaty in hand: Ishval would become ruled by Her own people as long and retain sovereignty as long as they remained in close connections with Amestris. The desolation of the barren fields departed to harvests bursting free with millet and sorghum, baskets piled high with soybeans and peaches and lemons and beancurd and anise.

The wasteland made fertile, the maimed whole, the ill healthy.

There came soft rains and the smell of the ground, and swallows circling their shimmering sound, and frogs in the pools, singing at night, and wild plum trees in tremulous white. White, no longer the colour of mourning and death, but life—he with a sash around shoulder and waist; she with her crown around the curve of her head.

 

_v. and Spring Herself, when She woke at dawn, would scarcely know that we were gone_

 


End file.
